in the last blog post I told you a bit about going back to old projects or start something new. I decided to go back to an old project. Since my budget is running super low and I can’t survive as indie game developer much longer – I had to make decisions and one of those were: Bringing Timbertales to the quality it deserves!
Added drop shadows and new idle animations
The quality of Timbertales
Timbertales was my first game project and I invested a lot into that game. It is based on a very complex server infrastructure and all the code is written with the libGDX framework. That means I haven’t used any game engine and had to write massive amounts of code. This makes the maintainability even harder and I wish it was achieved with Godot nowadays 🙂
Nevertheless the code isn’t bad at all it just takes so much more time to patch and change things if you have to do it all by code instead of an easy GUI editor. Timbertales were released in a no where near perfect state back in 2017. I had to rush myself because of the lack of money. The start wasn’t very successful and so I didn’t put much more effort in a project which took me more than a year of development time.
New water and shader for it
What has been changed so far?
I started last week to get back the project of course I had to get back into the code and understand things I have written years before, but it was kind of easy to pick up. As first step I started to improve some visual stuff and released a patch on last Friday you can find the complete patch log here: https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791459405092/announcements/detail/1717498690224730223
It is overwhelming how much I learned in the time and so I come up with a lot of changes and very different view than two years ago. My plan is to improve the visuals to make the game more appealing to a possible audience. Afterwards I would like to improve the store page on Steam and put up some new graphic assets like screenshots and trailer to push the sales. My goal is to get more community feedback and release a patch very week. That said tomorrow will hit another patch. Timbertales is also on sale at the moment, if you are interested in the game.
What are the next changes?
This week I also focused on tweaking, fixing bugs and improve the visual quality in general, but there were also a lot of thinking ongoing in which direction the development will move. There will be big game play changes upcoming. I also want to improve the balancing and add another story campaign, but first of all there is small little problem with the budget.
today I just wanted to write a bit about the latest release of Timbertales. Yeah! We left “Early Access” and we are live by now! Thank you all for your support, questions and money on all different Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Patreon.
I want to give you a small overview about the latest update of Timbertales:
Steam Achievements I think I don’t have to tell you much here. I added 30 achievements with their own pictures and challenges. There are also some hidden achievements, so good luck achieving them all!
Improvements to the game I increased the game speed a bit, so everything should feel a bit more fast paced. The attack animations should close the distance to your opponent and making the combat feeling more enjoyable. I spend also a lot of time into bug fixing, which includes problems with fullscreen mode, crashes in missions or wrong counting map objectives.
Idle Animations All units should feel more alive by now. I added new idle animations for every unit to make the game more lively.
Sound improvements There were a lot of sound effects, which were annoying or not matching at all. I made a lot of changes to the sound effects and I hope you like them.
Of course there were also a lot of code changes and cleanup overall. I wish you a lot of fun while playing Timbertales and feel free to share your thoughts!
Future of Timbertales I want to be open and share some insights with you. Unfortunately Timbertales didn’t sale very well and I didn’t received so much feedback I would have hoped for! Nevertheless there are some fans and I am still willing to invest time into the game. My backlog is full of cool features and updates, but how to say the game needs to pay off a bit first. I don’t want to earn a million bugs that said, but I can’t invest full time into a game, when I have less than two sales / week. So summarised if there is good feedback and the game performs quite well in future. I will invest more time 🙂
Rainware Bundle on Steam There are also some other news. I added a “Rainware Bundle” on Steam which includes both Steam games FlatFatCat and Timbertales with a discount of 30%. So if you aren’t own the games yet, make sure to take this chance 🙂
Future projects and some numbers You may ask what is the plan for the future of Rainware. So since I am still working as freelancer, for at least three more months, there isn’t something special or big upcoming within the next weeks. I actually have two game concepts which should work out quite well and I would love to introduce them to you within the next blog posts. I also have one open project related to localisation, also here I would love to introduce it. As far as Timbertales is released now and FlatFatCat is running quite a while I will take a break into the development of both games. The reason for that is simple as I stated before: These projects actually haven’t paid off for me yet.
I made a screenshot for you of revenues total (I like the numbers):
I am fine with it and every sale is a huge compliment for myself! For being economically its far behind expectation. Just to leave it here unstated both projects costs me around: 10.000-15.000$ So I am not willing to speak of a success yet 🙂 Also 666$ for about two years of being independent couldn’t make my living, if I would have this amount per month it would go into the right direction.
Thank you all so far for your support and stay tuned for news. I won’t give up yet and fill my pocket with some paid work. There will be huge projects following after the freelance time is finished. I promise that!
After the release of the latest patch for Timbertales it is time for a new game project. I gathered the required budget and already created a full concept for the new game project. I will shift my focus a little bit, but first let us speak about Timbertales and FlatFatCat.
Timbertales
The Version 1.3.0 improved a lot of the graphical interface and I am quite happy with the changes. Additional we added a new version to itch.io, I updated the version of Timbertales on Steam and I updated the mobile version on Google Play Store and Apple Store. Now, it is time to wait for user feedback to finally build the full release candidate. Since Timbertales is still in early access, I will gather more feedback over the time the third project will be developed. So I can take a look afterwards in which way Timbertales will be improved for the final release. If you haven’t already check out the new promotion trailer:
FlatFatCat
This game is a little bit harder to describe. Actually I like the game very much and I think we created a very cool game, which is a lot of fun and offers a lot of levels and diversion. Unfortunately it didn’t hit on the market as expected. The main reason for that is the lack of marketing budget in my opionion. The mobile market is quite hard and you need to create a buzz around your game to actually get some downloads. Otherwise your game is lost as many other good games in the void of the app stores. The steam version of FlatFatCat wasn’t performing as good as expected, since the game was fully planned for mobile devices. So in the end we will leave FlatFatCat as it is for now – willing to commit some budget in marketing in the near future.
Shifting focus of Rainware
As I said before I want to realign the focus of our games. With the experience made with FlatFatCat, I made the decision to avoid the mobile market and focus fully on core games. The vision needs to be “Creating games – I will play” that said of course I like Timbertales and FlatFatCat and I am also very proud, that I could release them, but I am a PC gamer since ages and love other types of games. Also the release platforms will change. Of course there will be Steam for PC, but I also want to extend to itch.io and GoG as well as I want to enter the console market including Xbox and PlayStation. (Nintendo switch would be a dream as well :))
Reveal Project III
Last but not least I will give you a small insight for the next project. What can you expect? We plan to create a game mixed with well known Moba aspects in a sandbox type of game. This also includes a lot of gathering, fighting, collecting and crafting. There will be rpg parts as well. This time we will have our first 3D game in an very atmospheric environment. Stay tuned for the next blog entries. We will update you with everything related to the new project and keep you updated about the development progress. The project is scheduled for at least 6 months.
Thanks for reading. Leave your questions or feedback!
I am proud to announce a new patch for Timbertales. This patch includes a lot of graphical improvements and replaces a lot of placeholders in the game. This patch is one of the first steps directing to the full release of Timbertales. Unfortunately I haven’t received much feedback about Timbertales within the last months, I would appreciate that a lot. This would allow me to further improve Timbertales and bring it to a full release. Nevertheless here are the change with 1.3.0:
Improvements
Replaced a lot of text with more fitting icons or shorter text
Improved Multiplayer screen
Improved Challenge screen
Improved Loading screen
Improved Lobby
Improved options
Improved profile screen
Improved game interface
Improved Popups, layouts and font colors
Improved exchange screen (android, ios)
Improved credits screen
Improved ranking screen
Improved mission overview
Added exit button in main menu
New Input fields
Windows and tabs were improved
Removed lots of unused assets and files
Added window animations
And many more small changes to layouts, assets etc. You will explore a whole new interface experience. I also plan to rework some of the units and animations in the near future. I would love to invest more time into the game, but I will need some feedback.
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